Ann Demeulemeester / Resort 2013

Search a show by:

Categorizing Ann Demeulemeester’s collection blanche—her white collection, in the somewhat unlikely event you needed the translation—as resort isn’t strictly accurate. It’s not that the clothes won’t appear in stores the same time the rest of this pre-spring season does—they will, absolutely. Yet unlike other designers’ resort, with their emphasis on newness, newness, newness, the Antwerp designer is instead offering the known, known, known. Since 2008, Demeulemeester has been making a trawl through the archives from her near 30 years designing, and reintroducing whatever she feels is right and relevant for the moment. Far from being as easy as that might sound, it’s actually where the real work kicks in. After all, you’d better have something really worth bringing back if, as she has been doing, you want to make old ground feel like it’s worth walking on again. Of course, being Ann Demeulemeester, she does—many times over. This reissuing approach is an affirmation that she has been making some of the most fluidly tailored and poetically nuanced clothes of any designer of her generation, with her constant riffing on black trouser suits, cotton tanks, white shirts, men’s vests, pajama pants, et al. Somehow, in picking out the time-specific, she only serves to emphasize their timelessness.

This last point clearly isn’t lost on the women who buy her clothes, who have been the prime movers in making the idea of this collection happen. So, if you’ve had a yen for the following, then come out later this year, you’ll be in luck: the “Holy” white cotton tank from spring 1998 (that show featured a sound track of Patti Smith reading an Allen Ginsberg poem); a black silk peignoir jacket from 2002 that was akin to the ones Demeulemeester had shown for her men’s spring 2013 just the previous day; an asymmetric white cotton shirt that can be worn whichever way (spring 2005); and a billowing black silk dress from 1993 that looks so startlingly perfect for right now, it’s enough to get Demeuelemeester aficionados logging on to eBay to find versions from back in the day. Demeulemeester, meanwhile, doesn’t limit herself only to clothes. Over in the showroom, a large, stately, structured handbag sits, that Demeulemeester is also reissuing. It’s capacious, but slim, and is an exact fascimile of the 1992 original. Well, almost. Open it, and there are a couple of inner pockets designed to take an iPhone, or a BlackBerry, or whatever tech gizmo wasn’t around 20 years ago. In some ways, time never stands still.